Hi, Spring fans! This week I am in beautiful Tokyo, Japan, where I just spoke at the always lovely annual Spring Fest event. I loved the show and I hope that they got something out of my performance.

Last week was tough. Possibly the toughest week of my life. I didn't publish an episode of A Bootiful Podcast, as such. You won't see that episode reflected on the blog because it was my heartbroken dedication to my father, who passed away last week at the age of 81. No interview in that brief, less-than-20 minutes episode.

I'm feeling a little better and was glad to come back to the work of writing this blog and find that there was an absolute ton of good stuff to read and consume. I hope you get something out of it, too.

• Flight of the Flux 3 - Hopping Threads and Schedulers
• Spring Boot for Apache Geode & Pivotal GemFire 1.1.4.RELEASE & 1.2.2.RELEASE Available
• Spring Session for Apache Geode & Pivotal GemFire 2.1.7.RELEASE and 2.2.1.RELEASE Available
• Spring Boot 2.1.x EOL November 1st 2020
• Learn how LAIKA, a premier stop-motion animation studio in Portland, OR, uses RabbitMQ
• Please take this survey to help us know what you'd like to change for Spring Cloud Data Flow
• Fellow Java Champion and Jetbrains' Trisha Gee concludes her epic series looking at Reactive Spring just in time for Christmas with this latest installment introducing RSocket
• Not strictly speaking related to Spring, but generally good advice for anyone interested in software architectures: Simon Brown's introduction to Layers, hexagons, features and components is a worthy read.
• DZone has a nice post on implementing Spring Boot with Spring Data JPA
• Thanks everyone - the @SpringData handle has crossed 30,000 followers!
• Our friends at Alibaba have open-sourced their Alibaba RSocket Broker supporting meshes, streaming & IoT, among other things
• Greg Turnquist published a nice video, Five Reasons to Use Spring Boot
• Register now to make this webinar (tomorrow, Wednesday the 19th, 2019), on Spring Cloud Kubernetes
• I loved this second introduction to Spring Data Neo4j's new Reactive implementation
• This SpringOne Platform 2019 talk, RabbitMQ & Kafka is now online and worth a watch.